On Fri, 20 Aug 2010, Harry Penner wrote:

> Actually I wasn't telling you what you ought to do with regard to net 
> neutrality.  I was asking you to think before doing anything.

Back in reality, on Thu, 19 Aug 2010 at 10:41:41, you wrote, "Seems to me 
we ought to show up and tell the FCC to keep their paws off us."


> I ask you again to think hard about what the consequences of such 
> regulation might be.  If we outlaw content meddling by ISPs, will it 
> cause unmetered connection prices to go up or maybe be phased out more 
> quickly than they otherwise would be?  Will it affect the usability of 
> VoIP or video streaming?  If we're dead set on some regulation as the 
> solution, is there a way to craft it to minimize those effects?  Your 
> point (in another thread) that we don't even know how the regulation 
> would be worded isn't an argument for or against it, but it would 
> certainly make me think twice.  Surely you wouldn't support a regulation 
> that would affect the entire Internet so broadly without knowing every 
> letter of what's in it?

Right -- we have to know what's in it before we oppose it or support it. 
This is what I've been saying and it is not what you were saying.  You 
might have meant to say something different, but your point was pretty 
clearly that government regulation will be bad, so we should oppose it.


I read a bunch of the stuff on this list today and a lot of it wasn't very 
impressive but I did like what Tony Yarusso wrote.  I liked it so much 
that I'm appending it below.  What's wrong with what Tony is saying?

Mike


Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 18:54:47
From: Tony Yarusso <tonyyarusso at gmail.com>
Reply-To: TCLUG Mailing List <tclug-list at mn-linux.org>
To: TCLUG Mailing List <tclug-list at mn-linux.org>
Subject: Re: [tclug-list] Net Neutrality hearing in Minnesota

Much of this discussion actually looks at things somewhat backward, IMO. 
The government would actually be the anti-regulation force here, and the 
ISPs the regulators.

Consider this:

One option is to have a free-flowing Internet where everything is equal, 
and just allowed to happen.  The "Information Superhighway" would be 
allowed to be a "free market" of ideas and content.

The other option is to have business executives decide they want to reward 
some of that traffic and punish others, or favor some customers over 
others, or charge extra fees for certain uses while subsidizing others. 
No content is guaranteed passage, but rather must meet the particular 
rules set forth for it.

Which one of those sounds like regulation to you?  Clearly it is the 
latter, which is the one done by ISPs, dictating which traffic will be 
"special" and which will be hindered.  The former is not regulation by the 
government, but a mandate that regulation must not be done by 
corporations.

The first case, with free flow of information, is the hands-off approach 
that allowed the Internet to flourish.  The difference is that now the 
corporations have the technology to put a stop to that, so people are 
asking the government to intervene in order to protect the integrity of 
the Internet's nature as it has been from the beginning.

  - Tony Yarusso